Mark Carney, ex-governor of the central banks in Canada and Britain, has written a much-hyped book about the problems with modern capitalism. But this consummate insider can’t trace the roots of those problems back to their fundamental sources.
A new biography of writer-director-performer Elaine May makes a strong case for her canonization as one of our greatest comic talents. Unfortunately, Hollywood never knew what to do with her.
The immense power financial institutions wield over most aspects of our lives makes a mockery of democracy. To build a truly democratic society, we need to democratize finance.
Why is there so much misery in a world of plenty? Why do private profit and wealth come before human needs and lives? Marxism has answers to these questions — answers that are actually easy to understand.
Unlike many in his party, Eugene V. Debs believed the struggle for black equality was critical to realizing the promise of socialism.
A looser union with more room for state and regional autonomy, as two recent books advocate, would cede much of America to the mercies of the Right.
The history of queer liberation movements is often talked about as distinct from the history of the Left. But in the first half of the twentieth century, queer people were abundant among American radical leftists — decades before the rise of an organized mass movement for gay rights.
Before his death in 2020, the conservative historian Paul Schroeder turned his attention to American empire. A lifetime spent studying the disastrous lead-up to World War I gave him reason to be horrified at the recklessness of US foreign policy.
Much more than just the wit and satirist of his posthumous reputation, Oscar Wilde was a radical thinker who posed a fundamental challenge to the conservative mores of late Victorian England. His thinking on liberation led him to imagine a socialist future in which creativity can flourish across all of society.
In the first part of an ongoing series covering Bernie Sanders’ time as mayor of Burlington, we look at Sanders’ years in the wilderness and the circumstances that made his rise possible.
After his narrow election as mayor, the fight for Bernie Sanders to carry out a progressive agenda in Burlington, Vermont was just beginning. Sanders and his allies had to fight through a recount, grapple with a looming fiscal crisis, and overcome incessantly hostile opponents in the city who refused to give Bernie an inch.
Mega-companies like Amazon and Walmart are already using large-scale central planning. We can wield that tool for good. Socialists need to renew our embrace of democratic planning and fight for a real alternative to capitalism.
A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War. This is only partly true: reactionaries did not just fear democracy, they feared the economic redistribution former slaves associated with it.
The foreign policy establishment is responding to Trump-era brutalities by demanding more, not less, aggression and empire.
As the Democratic Party clings to a message of compromise and conflict aversion, the GOP has adopted a fighting posture that seems to be resonating with working-class Americans.
In 1940s North Carolina, a Communist-led union of tobacco workers fought to bring democracy to the Jim Crow South.
For every one of the few anti-militarist screenplays that are made into films, far more are reflexively spiked because their defiant content raises objections from military leaders.
Printed out of a cattle barn in Minnesota, Anvil published some of the biggest leftist writers of the 1930s, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. Its popular vision for a multiracial socialism in the heart of the US could hardly be more urgent today.
In the US, lawyers gridlock politics, and in China, engineers solely concerned with development steamroll individual liberties. A new book argues that both nations could learn from one another, but their rivalry is obscuring the social crises they share.
For companies like BlackRock, the climate crisis is a valuable investment opportunity. They've positioned themselves to make money no matter how — or whether — governments address climate change.